Watched the horror movie [REC] (the original Spanish one, not the remake). It’s sort of a found footage type thing where it’s all told from the POV of a reporter’s camera.
The climax of the scene…
Mild Spoiler
takes place in pitch black for the characters and a night vision filter on the camera.
After the film ended, friends went home, and within a couple minutes of them leaving, all the power went out in the neighborhood. I’m not normally scared by horror movies, but I went and hung out in my car for a bit.
Growing up in an area with very frequent lightning storms, the number of times i remember being left with no light and no water (because well pump) in the middle of a shower is very high
The power went out while I was taking a shower when I was a kid. The bathroom had no window, so it was completely dark. I freaked out and got out with soap in my hair. My dad asked me why I didn’t just continue with the shower, “You know where everything is”.
Yeah, well, that sounds logical and obvious in hindsight. Thanks, dad.
I had a vacation cancelled when I was a kid because of the 2003 blackout.
I hadn’t saved my game for a VERY long time.
Flashing the BIOS on a PC.
Fortunately that M/B had a removable EPROM/whatever and I could get a replacement from the manufacturer.
God I miss all those removable parts in PCs and especially laptop
MBs used to have five or six slots and you had to fill them all. Sound card, HDD driver board, video card, network board, extra ports, etc.
And sometimes you ran out of ports and one thing wouldn’t work and you had to figure out a way to juggle everything so everything would work.
Dip switches and interrupts.
That sheet of paper taped to the inside of the case to record what devices were using which IRQ and DMA channels…
I was working at my power plant and it turned into an 18 hour shift lol
I was in traffic 30 minutes away from home when the 2003 blackout started. That was a long drive home.
Whatever I was doing I remember many times that happened I just got to watch the night sky
9/11
To be clear, I was nowhere near NYC at the time, but I was kinda glued to the TV, and what was functioning of the Internet, like the rest of the country was there for a few days.
Working on a project, and I hadn’t saved for a few hours.
After that I now save after every small addition to my projects.
I was playing stardew the other day and it only saves after you sleep for the night. Had an epic in game day. Character is getting into bed, power goes out. Welp, there goes my auto petter.
I was outside fishing with my brother and our sister came out and said “the tv is not working.”
Not power but our hot water heater went out in the dead of winter and we had a well. Our coldest winter is near freezing, not insane but those showers were awful. Ice water shower. I couldn’t adjust ever. The one upside was that I was warm stepping out of the shower, oddly much warmer than after a hot shower.
The trick to showering in cold water is to stand in front of the water stream on low, wash your hands, then rub the water up your arms, keep cupping and rubbing up your shoulders, neck, legs, hair, face, chest, and back. Your hand are pretty tolerant of cold water, and they warm it slightly. As you work around, you’re slowly desensitising your skin to the cold. All the capillaries begin to contract but not all at once sending a shock through your body. After a couple minutes of the rub down you’ll be able to step into the cold stream, still rubbing all over vigorously, without getting a shock. Thereafter, the cold stream doesn’t feel so bad.
The same works for swimming in very cold water. Go in about knee deep, rub the water all over yourself, and eventually you’ll be able to fully immerse and swim without the sudden shock
Hot shower triggers cooling mechanisms in your body, you’ll start to sweat and your body will start moving warmer blood out to the extremities, making you feel cooler as the heat radiates/convects off. When you step out of the warm enclosure into the cooler air, your body is still trying to dump heat so you’ll feel colder.
Basically the opposite happens with a cold shower. Warm blood is kept toward your organs to keep them functioning, so your extremities are chilled by the water. On top, the shower enclosure will be colder than the rest of the room, so you move from a cold area to a warm area, so that instant temperature change makes you feel warmer.
Was playing dart league and my partner was up power goes out right as he was throwing. It could have gone much worse. But all that happened was we had to restart the game.
Northeast blackout of 2003. People started to talk to their neighbours again and play cards instead of watching TV
They also called the cops because there were lights in the sky they’d never seen before.
The lights were stars.
I thought that was the big LA outage, where the Milky Way was visible. Could be both, I guess.
I used to go backpacking out in the middle of nowhere, miles from any city or town. The night sky is amazing, but nothing like what is shown in long-exposure pictures of the milky way.
Not that anyone asked, but it doesn’t look like this:
It’s more like this, and it needs to be a moonless night:
All I’m saying is, if this is on your bucket list, be prepared for the reality, or you might be a little disappointed. Still very much worth seeing, though.
Hmm, as a kid growing up in a remote pacific area, the milky way felt blinding when looking up at it with dark-adjusted eyes. It’s magnificent.
Nightfall IRL
Mid 1990s, winter storm, roads largely unusable, then an ice storm, trees fell over, power outage for days
My brother was on a mountain road in California during a forest fire. He didn’t realize how close it was, and it suddenly broke through the trees along the side of the road. As he was trying to escape--i.e. driving like a madman--a large tree fell across the road behind him just as he passed, like in a movie.
